Hypnotic hymn ... John Moran and his neighbour Saori. Photograph: Chang W Lee/The New York Times
When I first met John Moran he was sat cross-legged on the tattered church carpet, folding miniature flyers into envelopes half the size of a matchbox. He had come to Edinburgh with half his show missing, the brilliant dancer Saori having badly burnt her foot the week before. She had stepped in a bowl of boiling hot oil working a second job as a waitress to pay for the trip to the festival. Until she arrived in a flurry of hope and excitement a couple of weeks later, John did the show alone, performing his part and hers. The whole thing seemed too perfectly appropriate to be genuinely true; a story as bizarre, painful, sad and funny as those stitched together onstage.
If John recalls these Edinburgh misadventures during his stint at the Soho theatre this month, they'll become yet another colourful anecdote in his remarkable cabaret. John is part of a fine tradition of fiery-eyed American self-mythologisers, from Jack Kerouac to Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. His stories are borderline coherent, impossibly rich and romantic and almost always end in a piercing punchline that sends the whole thing jack-knifing towards make-believe.
There's the one about how he turned up in New York at Phillip Glass's door, announcing himself his protege; the one where he fought a musical duel with Jeff Buckley for the love of a beautiful girl; the one about being brainwashed by a Jungian suicide cult; and the time he lived in a secret garden in Paris and buried photos of his ex-girlfriend under a statue in the centre of the city. He tells them all in his own shyly boastful, naively knowing way - as honest as it is fanciful, as confessed as it is performed.
What is for certain is that this strangely enigmatic man blazed a trail across New York throughout the 1990s, creating a spectacular series of operas with people as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, Iggy Pop and Uma Thurman. Having only listened to recordings on the homemade CDs John sells at the end of his shows, I have no frame of reference for the extravagant productions that filled stages as grand as that of the Lincoln Center, but whether it be the haunting foreboding of The Manson family or the clinical dystopia of Mathew in the School of Life, the music hums with a mesmerising, theatrical beauty.
These days John has retreated from this kind of bombastic work. Exhausted by the sheer mechanical hugeness of it all, he has begun creating delicate, messy pieces for only a single dancer, Saori, performing in cabaret bars and studio theatres in less well-known corners of New York. In these miniature performances he painstakingly assembles various sounds into a seamless, almost mundanely naturalistic event (the petulant gossip of a server at McDonald's, a waitress in a busy bar), underscored by an unnoticeable rhythm. The most delicate, laboured-over music masquerades as the offhand and the everyday. Saori then performs astonishingly precise actions to these bizarre scores. The whole effect is infuriating, tantalising, utterly indecipherable and frequently beautiful.
The joy in these pieces is as much in the act of making as it is in the finished product - as if in the arduous process of building his pieces, John is able to find something salvageable, beautiful even, in a world he finds pretty repulsive otherwise. He seems less interested in the end product than the almost ritualistic quality assigned to creating it. This is all most apparent in his hypnotic hymn to Saori - a long, slow, graceful unfolding of both his method and their everyday life in a grimy apartment somewhere in New York. It's lovely to watch - not necessarily because of any great spectacle, or through admiration of the technical skill it must have taken to create, but simply because of the intense, redemptive meaning it seems to hold for him.
